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Media Essay: Guided questions

How do contemporary media represent different collective groups in different ways?

-          This must be the main focus of your essay!

-          Diverse representations including fiction, non-fiction and self-representation

-          Harry Brown, Fish Tank, The Inbetweeners, Attack the block, The London Riots news coverage, The Internet and Self mediation

How does contemporary representation compare with that of the past?

-          Examples needed for similarity and difference

-          Examples from the past – Quadrophenia Mods and Rockers

-          Have they changed? – Plato quote

What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?

-          Stereotyping: what is its impact?

-          What power does the audience have to ‘resist’

-          Propaganda, moral panic, youths as empty categories, cultural hegemony,  Stuart Hall and reading the texts and their messages

-          Statistics on result of these representations on attitudes and beliefs Vs the reality of the issues

To what extent is human identity increasingly ‘mediated?’

-          Increasing media=increasing mediation?

-          Re-presentation by others/by selves (Facebook, YouTube)

-          Be critical of who is offering the representations and for what purpose

-          Mediated: How the media shapes your world and the way you live in it

Guidance:

-          Add your own personal opinion

-          What in your opinion is the future of representation and what are you basing this on?

-          Connections must be made between the examples/contrasts are discussed

-          You must embed the theory into what you are saying

-          Refer to MORE than one media – (film, newspaper, TV)

Essay Structure:

1-      Introduction – Start with a quote, paraphrase it and link it to issues of identity, representation, and the media. State your focus (YOUTHS AND YOUTH CULTURE)

2-      Historical example (Quadrophenia/Plato) – talk about wider context

3-      Contemporary examples – (Harry Brown, The Inbetweeners, Facebook, YouTube)

4-      Connect examples together

5-      Conclusion – return to start. Prediction for the future

6-      Sentence structure: Example – Significance – Theory – Critique

Advice

-          Use referencing (name and year of publication Eg, Giroux 1997)

-          use one text older than 5 years – Quadrophenia

-          Other texts from within the last 5 years

Conclusion

-          Return to the start

-          Summarise key idea

-          Prediction for the future

Mass media construct representations of youth from a middle class, adult perspective, for the ideological purpose of maintaining hegemony.

Impact of new media technologies/internet – more potential for self – representation; limited impact compared to mass media